URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models

Bo Lv, Chen Tang, Yanan Zhang, Xin Liu, Ping Luo, Yue Yu


Abstract
Prior research endeavors of the ensemble Large Language Models (LLMs) achieved great success by employing an individual language model (LM) rank before the text generation. However, the use of an individual LM ranker faces two primary challenges: (1) The time-intensive nature of the ranking process, stemming from the comparisons between models; (2) The issue of error propagation arising from the separate ranking and generation models within the framework. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel ensemble framework, namely Unified Ranking and Generation (URG). URG represents an end-to-end framework that jointly ranks the outputs of LLMs and generates fine-grained fusion results, via utilizing a dedicated cross-attention-based module and noise mitigation training against irrelevant information stemming from bad ranking results. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in both the ranking and generation tasks. With the close coordination of the ranking and generation modules, our end-to-end framework achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on these tasks, and exhibits substantial enhancements to any of the ensembled models.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.261
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4421–4434
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.261
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.261
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bo Lv, Chen Tang, Yanan Zhang, Xin Liu, Ping Luo, and Yue Yu. 2024. URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 4421–4434, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models (Lv et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.261.pdf